I’ve seen no less than three articles today saying that the average consumer is paying too much for their smartphone plan. And it just may be true. This article by consumer reports states that the average ATT user goes through 300MB or less each month.

Meaning they could drop from the $30 plan to the $20 plan and be fine. That would be $120 savings a year. Spread over two years, $200+ to spend on an upgrade phone might not be bad.

But here at Androidandme we’re not the “average user” are we? How much data do you use? I’m on Sprint. I average about 2.5GB per month, and the most I have ever used is 4GB.

What do you use? Could you save money by switching to a tiered plan?

And most importantly for the average user… is it more clear that the carriers are charging too much? Verizon doesn’t even offer a plan for less than two gigs. But if the average user is going through 10% of that… then they are far overpaying aren’t they? What should data cost then?

Forgot to mention that I pay â‚¬5 for the 1GB per month. I dont know if this will be â‚¬10 now, since this was a discount rate for the period of my contract wich ends this month. I renewed, but it wasn’t very clear whether I would continue to pay â‚¬5 of â‚¬10 a month.

Nevertheless OVer here â‚¬10 is not that expensive, since all carriers decreased the data cap/limit and thus effectively increasing the price per MB.

I used over 16GB in January, and started getting throttled by Verizon. I have since used Llama to turn on Wifi whenever I’m at home, and dropped it down around 2GBs per month (they stopped throttling me a week ago. I live in a place where home internet speeds peek out at 6mbps, but my LTE gets an average of 12mbps. My wife is also frequently using the desktop computer, and without real need to use a conventional PC, I just use my phone to do almost all my browsing, music streaming, and YouTube watching. I do not download a bunch of stuff or watch Netflix on my phone.

I think we do pay too much for our data plans considering how instrumental they are becoming to our world nowadays. With more and more cloud services, our data usage is going to grow exponentially. We need a set up for our mobile data that is much more flexible like our home and office internet connections.

Yes, I know building out more network capacity is expensive, but the carriers are still able to do it while cutting a large profit.

I think the solution is for the carriers to quickly build up their networks to be able to support 100% VoLTE coverage, then they can cut off the dead weight of old spectrum such as GSM and CDMA. However, I think this is unlikely anytime soon.

Yes we are and it is all because people are willing to pay it and the carriers know this so they charge the prices they do. it’s not like they aren’t making killer profits but it’s all about how much you can bring in so sadly I can’t see data prices going down anytime soon.

I think this is kind of the OP’s point. We’re paying for more than we need / use. Whether it’s for all you can eat (Sprint) or for tiers (other carriers), perhaps we’d be better served by having cheaper non-unlimited options.

I use about 20 GB’s per month on my Verizon 4g network and am grandfathered on unlimited for $29.99. But on there current plans I would be paying $180 per month. Crazy is what it is. It’s my phone I should be able to use as much I want/need to at a fair price.

1.5-2GB/Month is around what I do. Occasionally, I’ll get close to my 5GB limit but that is only when things are slow at work. I don’t use much because when I get home WiFi comes on automatically. I don’t use my phone much at home because I have more comfortable options. When I’m away from home I use the tethering feature quite a bit though.

I guess I’m paying for more than I use, but it’s nice to know that if I need it it’s there. I was throttled once and it was very painful.

I spend a good about of time on wifi because it’s faster. There is no point to burn through a lot of data unless you are always on the go. I stay at places for a certain about of time.I would agree that $10 for 500 sounds ideal.